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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Zero authority. But it’s a stress test. Can we get judges to go along? Juries? What can we get them to believe is a legal command? Can we get ICE into houses without warrants? Can we prosecute Mayors and Police officials for not providing data that is a request?

    They’re going to push as far as people let them push. This is why the Federalist Society has been trying to pack the courts with conservative judges for decades. Defense Attorneys are going to have to step up and stop plea dealing so much stuff. But that’s a lot harder to do than to say because they’re criminally under resourced and over worked. (Not metaphorically in some states) In a system where the default is a plea deal to get out of jail there’s going to be a lot of convictions for things that aren’t actually crimes. The entire reliance on plea deals was predicated on good faith prosecutions.





  • The only really new thing in there is the genetic diversity. Some of that paper is a straight up thought experiment meant to persuade, not report findings. For example, the bit about flowering bamboo and how they must have endured thousands of such events in 8 million years. In rebuttal I would ask how do the authors of that paper know that the population hasn’t been getting whittled down by such events, bit by bit. They make suppositions about ranging farther for food, but again provide no findings. There are multiple other problems with the paper, including mischaracterizing their own tables but I’ll leave it there.

    I will say that paper does a good job summarizing the position of people saying they will go extinct. By the way the full paper is freely available at Molecular Biology and Evolution. I would love to be wrong, they are very fun to watch. And if they can thrive with their habitats reconnected and protected then that’s great. But I’m also not going to be surprised to find out it’s just not in the cards.